I’ve been blogging now since 2011. I hope I have shared a few things worth reading over the years. I appreciate my agency allowing me this leeway to write. I never wrote anything political that would contradict our agencies policies. And I appreciate the National Bobwhite and Grasslands Initiative for providing this forum and for posting this BLOG for me all this time.
There are so many stories I would have liked to have shared with you, but only a couple friends ever really hear a person out and that doesn’t even happen very often. Tales of running long river traplines as a teenager, or shearing Christmas trees during summer for minimum wage all the yellow jacket stings each day a free bonus, or standing on stage with a bluegrass band so nervous I could barely feel my finger picks about to play for an audience and get paid for it. For an ordinary guy, I have been blessed with an extraordinary life. If we had spent more time around a fire with an adult beverage or two, I would have told you about the time I was a smoke jumper on a night drop in Panama onto a burning drop zone, and how the sky was orange and I remember thinking, “I hope they know which side of the fire they are dropping us on.” Or the time my unit was lost so deep in the jungle not knowing what to do. We looked upriver and drifting down around the bend came multiple indigenous people in dugout canoes. They gave us a primordial lift. Imagine that, with all our technology and gear, we were saved by natives in dugout canoes. The one mistake we made – loading all our rations into one canoe without us. That canoe kept on going after they dropped us off at a nearby village. Us twice outsmarted by the locals. We spent two days cutting a helicopter landing zone in a coffee plantation to get resupplied (the captain nearly lost his career over that one). I have always thought those native peoples will be here long after we are gone. Or the time I was part of a 4-man recon team going to scout a distant landing craft landing point trying to mark tides and see when enough water rose over the sandbar to get in the river mouth, and I got to ride a Navy Swift Boat through the Panama Canal. Upon exiting the canal and breaking into open ocean, the captain told us all, tie down your gear and find something to hang onto and don’t let go until I tell you to. I thought a bass boat was fast! One thing to note about my service that I remember above all else…being so tired many times I could not even shower before sleeping after weeks in the field. I would place an old towel over my pillow to keep the grime off and sleep like the dead for 15 hours. I’ve been tired here sometimes, but never that tired again.
I would love to tell you about the summer I trapped black bears with a friend on his master’s project, catching 42 in Aldrich snares in less than three months. Seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day with one weekend off a month for $600.00 a month plus room and board. I recall how proud I was to have a “real wildlife job.” And what it was like to live out in the middle of nowhere on Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge trapping quail and running free and learning to be self-sufficient. We called the refuge Jurassic Park because of all the bears, wolves, bobcats, otters, snakes, and gators that abounded there. I remember one night helping a USFWS staff member do a gator survey, getting socked in by fog, and seeing those big glowing orange tennis ball eyes of a gator just before we ran up on a log and nearly capsized. It’s where I met the folks with DGIF (will always be DGIF to me) that eventually hired me. The hard work paid off, not that I expected anything other than respect for a job well done.
So many stories working with so many great people…all with their own stories. Seems the world now is broken down into blurbs on a social media platform and the art of sitting around a picnic table at lunch just talking is a lost one. I could tell you about the old deer check stations, long before CWD, and before tele-check. We worked the country stores in the last of the hey days of deer camps. Checking, weighing, and aging as many as 200 deer a day. And doing so much more than that. We talked to the hunters. The best focus group you could ask for, a mix of deer hunters from all over eager to talk to us. Days where we left home at 4:00 a.m. and got back close to midnight (much like CWD stations now).
And there were long nights doing deer herd health checks. This meant harvesting 15 to 20 deer at night with suppressed rifles out on some of the coldest nights of the winter standing in the back of a pickup truck on a cold metal bed for hours and getting warmed up only by dragging the deer back. Sometimes we would not begin processing the deer until midnight. After we gathered the data we needed, they were all donated to Hunters for the Hungry. On one occasion daylight was breaking when I got home in my blood-soaked clothes. But it built a team much like working CWD check stations or sharing labor on a prescribed fire builds teams now. It’s hard to get to know someone when everything is going well, and the work is easy. It is those hard times and long days in bad weather where you see someone’s true nature emerge. And then there are all the stories about raising my daughter that could fill another volume. I’ve been blessed with friends and family and land and love.
I’ll leave you with this story about my last helicopter ride. It was me and Sergeant Cecil sitting next to each other in the dark as the day cooled. We were part of multiple “chalks” or lines of soldiers waiting for a ride “out of the boonies.” It was early fall but still hot during the days, and we’d been out long enough to forget exactly how long. Humping from point A to Point B and back and then back again, carrying more on our backs than any human not a Sherpa should carry. And we were both set to get out of the Army soon. And we’d ridden more helicopters than we could count and parachuted out of many of them. UH-1H Hueys, pushing up and out hard to clear the skids, and the Blackhawks that we called Crashhawks in their early days (that’s another story sometime), or the Cadillac CH-47 Chinooks where you just walked off the tailgate at 1000 feet with no prop blast and a 6 second free fall – and I was scared to death every time I rode in one, thrilled but terrified and addicted to it. I leaned my head left and could hear that distant rotor chop that’s been described as a sound you can feel as much as hear (Michael Herr – “Dispatches”). And the noise got louder and then you could see those rotor tips glowing purple and blue from the static electricity in them and you could make out the eerie green interior lights and when they got real close you could see the pilots, as young as we were with night vision goggles on, flying so close together it made your heart hurt. And then they were on the ground and Sergeant Cecil and I were running with heads held low and then we were on that last helicopter ride and I prayed to myself let us get off this thing safely one more time Lord. And then after that nap of the earth flight rush at 130 mph we settled back on the ground and were off on the tarmac. And Sergeant Cecil and I stopped and looked back as those birds rose and disappeared into the night like apparitions leaving nothing behind but the smell of jet fuel, were they real? Were we? and we looked at each other and shook hands and just stood there laughing. What else could you do. What a great ride it’s been folks. God Bless all of you and happy trails.
